Advice Needed: Aperture 3 and RAW + JPEG

[Grumpwurst]

I decided to start a new topic for this discussion.

I am one of those weird people who shoot NEF + JPEG and I've been doing a lot of reading on the Aperture support forum on Apple's site and it seems like a lot of people feel that it's a waste of valuable CF storage space because of the ease of getting JPEGs out of the RAW images in A3.

First, is that true?

Second, my biggest problem is that my wife likes to scrapbook and wants easy access to JPEGs and that was one of the main reasons I started shooting that way (that and I wanted quick access to JPEGs for my now stagnate blog because of my lack of a software file organization system). ; Is Aperture easy to teach someone how to export out a JPEG.

I did think of this idea and wonder if it's a good solution:

• Go back to straight RAW shooting
• Import files into Aperture
• Create a smart album called "For Scrapbook" or create a Smart Album for each scrapbook project
• Have Nancy navigate the photo browser and put in the keyword that drives the Smart Album(s) for each picture she wants to ultimate export out to JPEG for printing
• Export out the contents of the Smart Album to JPEG onto a CF of SD card for a trip to Wal-Mart for printing or her Canon photo printer
• Once exported delete the Keyword from those pics

Yes, this adds the extra step of needing to tag the photos and it assumes that it is easy to add the keywords and easy to batch remove a keyword. But, it was also a lot of work to sift through the Windows folders using Thumbnail View to find the pictures, open them up to see if they are as good as the thumbnail seemed to indicate, and then copy them to a folder that could then be copied to the media for printing.

I also used the JPEGs in a similar manner to get files uploaded to Facebook and it now seems like albums can be easy uploaded to Facebook so that is another counter to my "must have JPEGs" argument.

Tell me what you think. ; This doesn't solve my overall file management but does provide a solution that will give me more space on my cards and save valuable hard drive space.

 

[Roger]

I love the FB option in A3. ; You don't even need to convert them to JPG for it to work, and you can add photos to them later. ; (I think the instructions on how to do so aren't out there but I figured it out)


To export an image OR group of images you just have to select the image, right click and choose Export-->Version. ; The export window will appear and you can choose what directory you want the images to export to and what kind of JPGs. ; You can create your own defaults for the JPGs, like max size in pixels, quality (this one goes to 12), and then a name for the default, so you can have some for the web, for printing, or for desktop size (examples).

The biggest problem is that the JPGs will be exported using Apple's camera defaults - so very little post-processing. ; Once you get comfortable with Aperture you may want to add one step of selecting a default group of processing options, like exposure recovery, vibrancy, saturation, etc....which you can batch process to every image before you then export them. ; I think there is a way to tell Aperture to use the camera JPG first however. ; Not sure how.

I'm only planning on shooting JPG+RAW when I know my wife wants the pics to post to her FB page while traveling...she doesn't want to wait for them! ;